Here is a list of the most common weapons used on naval platforms today:
1. Naval Gun/Cannon
Although the advent of gunpowder weapons came about in the 10th - 12th century AD, the first practical use of ship-mounted weapons only came about in the 15th century with sailing ships capable of mounting heavy guns on their decks. These cannon, though lethal, had a very slow rate of fire, and were too heavy to be maneuvered around in battle. Thus ships in the Age Of Sail had to mount large amounts of cannon on both sides of the ship to serve as a effective combat platform, and the action of firing a whole battery of guns on one side earned the term 'broadside'.
As technology progressed, sailing warships progressed from frigates to 'man-o-wars' to 'ships of the line', the line referring to the line of battle. Such ships of the line, the last major type of warship before the steam-powered ironclad, had up to three decks carrying over 120 cannon.
The USS Constellation, a typical frigate of the 18th century
With the advent of ironclads came a new innovation in gun design - the naval gun turret, first fielded on the USS Monitor. This invention enabled shipboard guns to be trained through a wide field, eliminating the need for large numbers of guns. Improvements in gun design also increased he range of naval engagements, and steam power became the main locomotive force for warships.
The USS Monitor
Most 19th century and early 20th century warships relied on increasingly larger calibre turret-mounted guns as their main armament while others, like destroyers, torpedo-boats and submarines, relied more on torpedoes to do damage. Such guns still did not have good gun accuracy, however, and in naval battles like Tsushima, the most number of hits scored on ships were still by smaller, faster-firing small-calibre guns which depended on luck and sheer rate of fire to strike the target, however damage was little.
The HMS Agammemmon, an example of a 'pre-dreadnought' like those at Tsushima
The improvement of gun aiming, directing and rangefinding helped solve the problem and in the 1900s, Britain came up with the first battleship that represented a revolution in naval warfare. HMS Dreadnought, was the first warship to feature all big-gun armament, and was heavily armoured, big pluses in battle.It represented such a major technological leap that all other warships that came after it and featured such designs were classified 'dreadnoughts'.
Aircraft and subsurface torpedoes, meanwhile, had matured into naval weapons and their superiority over the gun-armed battleship increased and culminated in the crippling and sinking of the German battleship Bismarck and the Japanese Yamato in WW2, both representing the pinnacle of battleship design, the latter's guns having a muzzle bore of 46 cm and able to hurl thousand-pound shells as far as 40+ km.
Even though this represented the end of the all-gun battleship as the premiere warship, the gun is still part and parcel of naval war platforms today. Every class of ship, from the humble patrol craft to the largest aircraft carrier, still carries guns for a whole range of purposes, including anti-aircraft and anti-missile warfare, ship-to-ship engagements and ship-to-land bombardment. The muzzle bore for these weapons ranges from the 7.62mm machine gun to the 40mm autocannon to the 155mm advanced gun system on the new Zumwalt-class destroyer. In the near future, electromagnatic rail guns capable of firing projectiles at hypersonic speeds (Mach 5 and above) are expected to be fielded on ships. Clearly the gun is still going to be with us for a long time to come.
Ironclad photo taken from
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